City of Rose Read online

  Pressure builds behind my eyes. I blink it away.

  “You want to know something? You want to know what I believe?” Crystal leans forward, smiling. “I believe that one day, the firefighters who responded that day are going to be like the knights or samurai of our generation, you know? Our definition of what it means to be a warrior.”

  The way she says it, the smile that dances across her lips, the light in her blue-green tempered glass eyes, something big and invisible fills my chest and it’s all I can do to keep breathing. I fight to keep my voice level, say, “I never thought of it like that.”

  The woman behind the counter calls out Crystal’s name. She jumps up and grabs the tray, brings it to the table. I pick up my sandwich and jam it into my mouth, try to eat. It singes the top of my mouth and my throat is thick so it’s a struggle, but I’m thankful to have something to hide behind.

  Needing to move onto another topic, I tell her, “I know it’s a little rude, because not a lot of the girls like being asked this, but I figure… it’s different now, right? Is it okay if I ask your real name?”

  She looks up, unblinking, her face straight. She swallows the bit of sandwich that’s in her mouth and says, “My name is Crystal.”

  Crystal swings her car up a tight incline, flashing her lights and pounding on her horn. Multiple signs plastered on the walls suggest she do this. The parking garage for Powell’s is terrifying. The ramp is a hard blind turn that’s big enough to barely fit one car and it’s meant to go two ways. I grip the car’s oh-shit handle the whole way.

  We get up into the lot unscathed and she pulls the car into a free spot. After dropping the keys off with the attendant we head inside to find that the entire store is wall-to-wall people. The Strand in Manhattan is like this, constantly packed so it’s hard to move through the stacks, but this place is humongous. Like a warehouse, sectioned off and full of books. So big the rooms are color-coded.

  It’s a good place to waste a day, wandering, drinking coffee, flipping through books for snippets of stories, and best of all, being alone in a crowd. Everyone’s attention is otherwise occupied so you can become anonymous in these aisles. Coming here is the closest I’ve felt to being home.

  “So what are we getting again?” I ask.

  “Every week I get Rose a new book,” Crystal says, leading me through the throng. “I have to have a new book ready for her when we find her. She’ll be upset if I don’t.”

  We get to the kids’ section and Crystal stops, staring ahead, watching little kids run around and laughing with their parents. I think she’s upset to be seeing that, so I put my hand on her shoulder because I think maybe that’s what she needs. She moves a little bit toward me, almost like she’s going to press herself against me, and then she doesn’t and we’re just standing there.

  The moment passes. She steps away and I ask if she wants coffee and I think she shakes her head no, so I wander in and out of the rooms, trying to remember where the coffee counter is. A half dozen times I’ve been here and I can never remember. I stop in the blue room for a couple of minutes—literature—because I know that’s close, and I browse, check out the staff picks, see if there’s anything interesting.

  I catch the sign for coffee, which is in the gold room—genre and graphic novels—and make a mental note to remember that for next time. I head there and order a small to go. The barista smiles at me in a way that I’m worried might be flirting, so I nod and take the cup from her, leave my change in the tip jar. The coffee is blazing hot, so that I have to pass it between my hands every so often. I see the sign for crime and mystery books. I guess that’s relevant to my interests. I walk the lane and grab a random book off the shelf. Bright yellow cover with the silhouette of a big tattooed motherfucker on the front. The Hard Bounce. I thumb through it. The passages I skim are funny. Though the author is probably a puny nerd who’s never seen a rumble in his life, acting out some fantasy of power. Most of these authors are doing that, I figure. Still, it looks interesting enough, and I’ve got nothing new to read. I tuck it under my arm, take another tentative sip at the coffee, and it’s still too fucking hot.

  I return to the kids’ section and find Crystal flipping through a stack of books, one foot curled back behind her so she’s balancing on the heel of the other. I come up alongside her and ask, “What kind of books does Rose like?”

  “Stuff about girls, or animals,” she says, not looking up. “Adventure stuff. I like to buy books with strong female protagonists.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “Having a kid.”

  Crystal steps away from the shelf, moves to the next one over. “It’s fucking hard. I didn’t plan to have her. She just… happened. Given what I do it’s not always easy, but we make it work. Until now, I guess. But I don’t regret it for a second. She’s the best little girl in the world. Every parent says that about their kid. Every other parent can go fuck themselves, because it’s true about Rose.” She pauses and looks up at me. “Do you want kids?”

  “I never really gave it much thought. When I first got here I thought of getting a dog. Now that I have an apartment that’s a little bigger, and there’s all this space, parks everywhere, I thought, dog would be cool. I came close. But I didn’t because it was something I had to be responsible for. And if I’m not responsible enough for a dog, I know I’m not responsible enough to have a kid.”

  “Well, the beautiful thing about having a kid is everything takes so long, you get used to it. The pregnancy lasts long enough you get used to the idea of being a parent. The kid can’t walk for long enough that you can get used to the idea of having some insane little person running around your house like Leatherface. By the time Rose could walk I had a pretty good grasp on it.”

  She stops flipping books and pulls one out, a small rigid book with a cartoon girl in a spacesuit on the front. It’s called Abby the Astronaut.

  “This is perfect,” Crystal says.

  We head down to the register and pay and the girl behind us in line, a white girl with a bindi, looks up at my hat and asks, “Where did you get that, man?”

  “Texas.”

  “Are you Texan? You don’t sound Texan.”

  “New Yorker. Born and raised.”

  “Oh god, you’re from New York? That’s so cool. I’m dying to check out Williamsburg one day. You know, fingers crossed.”

  “That’s exactly what Williamsburg is missing. Williamsburg is missing you.”

  The girl tilts her head and her face scrunches into an awkward smile.

  “You are such a dick,” Crystal whispers. But she laughs after she says it.

  We don’t get lost this time as we roll toward the DXM house where I first had the pleasure of meeting Thaddeus. Not exactly someone I’m looking to revisit, but the day has been nothing but a series of strikeouts.

  None of Dirk’s friends have seen him. We stopped at two heroin dens. An apartment downtown and a ranch-style home way on the outskirts of town. Both places looked about the same on the inside—people sprawled out, floating between this reality and another. Unpleasant, stale smells heavy in the air. No one had seen him recently enough that it was of any use.

  We stopped at a pizza place where Dirk worked for a week before he got fired for stealing out of the register, and a warehouse where he worked as a porter. Whiffed at both.

  I get to see a lot of the town at least. Learn a little more about how it’s put together. See some more bad driving. Though I spent a lot of the time looking out the side view mirror, to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  Our last hope today is Thaddeus. Maybe he’s seen or heard from Dirk, and he’s sober enough to relay that. Maybe there’ll be someone else there. Maybe he has something, some kind of clue that will indicate where he’s gone.

  And hopefully nobody is touting a shotgun after having dipped into a stash of hallucinogens that were processed with tools from underneath a kitchen counter.


  It’s been a quiet day between us, otherwise. Crystal’s words are bouncing around the inside of my chest like fireflies. I feel like I’ve been sitting in the fucking dark for so long, locked in a room with this part of myself that I hate. And talking to her has made me feel things I haven’t felt in a long time.

  Maybe there’s something to this being-human thing.

  As we get closer to the DXM house, I smell something burning.

  It’s not uncommon to smell things burning around here. Lots of leaves and fireplaces and fire pits in backyards, emanating that warm, comforting smell of burnt wood.

  But this is acrid. Harsh and chemical and black.

  My father would have been able to say exactly what it was. When I was a kid, we would be driving, or I’d be at the firehouse, riding along to a call, and he’d take a sniff and say, “Oh, that’s a polyester couch.” The way he said it was like, why doesn’t everyone else know that?

  And as we turn the corner on the block, we’re greeted by a cavalcade of emergency vehicles clogging the street, their lights spinning and flashing. There’s a crowd of people watching from behind green police sawhorses.

  All of them are staring at the gutted, smoking remnants of the DXM house.

  We sit there for a little while before Crystal says the sensible thing, which is: “We need to go.”

  She puts the car into drive, swings out a wide U-turn, and heads back toward Chinatown. Driving slowly this time, no more juking around the cars that are aimlessly drifting around the road like clouds.

  “What the fuck?” she asks.

  “Got me.”

  “Do you think this has anything to do with the people from the cartel?”

  “They were processing drugs with stuff they probably got at the local hardware store,” I tell her. “That seems like a good recipe for going ka-blooey.”

  We stop at a light and Crystal looks at me. “Do you really believe that? That it was an accident.”

  “Not really, no.”

  We drive in silence the rest of the way to the club.

  Soon as I walk in the door Tommi pulls me aside and asks me to grab some cases of beer from the basement and mop up both bathrooms because she didn’t have time to get to them today. Crystal scurries off to the back and Tommi realizes we came in together and she narrows her eyes.

  “You two carpooling now? You’re buddies?” she asks.

  “I’m charming.”

  “Right. Get to work.”

  So I do, on autopilot, my hands hauling the beer and wringing out the mop, and I know they’re my hands, but I feel disconnected from them. My brain is spinning too hard, so it doesn’t engage with the rest of me, like a gear that’s come loose.

  Okay. Think it out.

  Dirk takes the kid, gives the kid to a foster family. But he’s insulted at the idea he’s not invested in her well-being. He’s not selling the kid into anything hellish, or so he says. Another party, presumably not Dirk, is telling us that everything is okay and to fuck off.

  So why take the kid in the first place?

  This would make some kind of sense, maybe, if Crystal was a bad mom and he was trying to save the kid, which I’ve got no indication is true. Dirk may have had designs on being a dad but he lacked follow-through, and this whole thing sounds like Rose is with a complicit third-party. She’d have to be. How do you make a kid disappear like that?

  So Dirk is trying to leave town and we stop him—I think we stop him—but someone was meeting him at that train station. Someone who didn’t want me talking to Dirk. Most likely Chicken Man.

  Maybe it’s connected to the DXM lab, maybe not. If it is… maybe someone’s trying to erase Dirk? If the explosion at the lab was set off on purpose, that makes sense, a little. Like someone is wiping their arm across a chessboard and knocking off all the pieces.

  Unless it was a random explosion related to drug manufacturing, and then who the fuck knows?

  My head hurts.

  The crowd ebbs so I belly up to the bar and Tommi puts a glass of ice water in front of me. I consider asking for something a little harder but figure she wouldn’t want me drinking on the job. Hood doesn’t drink—I don’t know if that’s by design or what. I take a sip of the water and watch as Carnage finishes collecting the piles of bills at the foot of the stage and grabs her clothes in a tight wad against her bare chest and Crystal replaces her.

  Her black hair is pulled into a tight ponytail, so tight it looks painful, showing off the shaved part of her head. Red red lips on white skin. She’s wearing a sheer black thing and big leather boots that go up to her knees, with silver zippers running down the inside. Black gloves that look like velvet.

  Once she’s on the stage she makes a big exaggerated smile and winks at a scruffy-looking guy with big glasses sitting at the foot of the stage, and Carnage cues up Crystal’s songs on the way back to the dressing room

  First up is “Faith” by George Michael.

  Crystal spins around the pole, contorting her face into pleasant shapes.

  In the car, in my apartment, she’s small and sharp with an iron shell.

  She’s a completely different person up on stage. Big and magnetic. Beckoning to the crowd, wanting to bring them in on a secret, but a secret they have to earn first. I take another sip of water, feel a rush of heat course through me.

  She’s beautiful. Not the way she looks. That too, for sure, but there’s something about her that puts me at ease. And I haven’t felt at ease in a long time.

  The way she carries herself, the way she looks at me, the way she says the thing I need to hear. She cuts through my bullshit in a way like Chell did. I don’t know if that bodes well or not, but it’s still nice.

  As George Michael sings she tugs at her gloves, slowly getting them off, twirling them around, tossing them back toward the mirror behind her, and she goes at the black sheer thing, peeling it from her body like tape, and it won’t come free easy. Like it’s trying to keep you from that thing you want.

  Fuck that sheer thing.

  She dips her right thigh and pops back up, rotating her entire pelvis like greased-up gears, perfect revolutions all the way around, and it near knocks me off my feet.

  By the end of the song she’s naked save the boots, which I know she won’t take off, and she looks up, in the gap between the words, and she sees me staring, and I want to look away because this feels rude. But I don’t. I hold her blue-green tempered glass eyes and smile and she winks at me.

  The way she winks.

  Fuck.

  The second song comes on. “This Must be the Place” by the Talking Heads. Dammit, she’s got great taste in music. And this wouldn’t seem like a song that’s made for stripping but on Crystal it fits like racing stripes. She drops into a split, driving her pelvis into the ground, but I’m suddenly less interested in what she’s doing, and more interested in the two guys sitting in the far corner of the stage by the back wall.

  One is heavyset, with short, curly black hair, like he’s got a pad of steel wool glued to his head. Thick in the chest and the arms with skinny legs that look like tent poles. The other is scrawny with a patchwork beard that’s probably supposed to be cool but really makes him look like a rat.

  Brillo Head and Rat Face are going back and forth, talking intently, glancing around like they’re playing the angles of the room. A couple of glances over at me, too.

  The one thing they’re not looking at is the knock-ass gorgeous woman who is twirling in front of them, naked for the world to see.

  Every now and again some asshole comes in and ignores the girls, acts like he’s too good for them, but really it’s a game. Like maybe if he acts like he isn’t interested it’ll make him seem mysterious.

  This doesn’t feel like that. This feels like something else.

  The song is winding down and Crystal is spinning faster, and I put my hat down over my drink and cut around to the high-top table behind these two knuckleheads, because maybe I can listen to
what they’re saying, or else at least I’ll be in position if they pull something.

  Which, in fairness, this all might be paranoia.

  There’s a lot going on and it’s not entirely unexpected for me to start jumping at shadows.

  As I reach the table the song ends and Crystal drops to her hands and knees, picking up the dollar bills that made their way onto the stage, and the two guys are getting to their feet now, so I push past them and start picking up bills too, like I’m trying to help, but really I’m putting myself between her and them.

  She looks up at me, confused, but doesn’t stop picking up the money.

  One of them taps me on the shoulder. I turn and it’s Brillo Head. He says, “You bumped into me.”

  “Please accept my sincere apologies.”

  He laughs like a cartoon bear, says, “I don’t appreciate your tone.”

  I think he’s kidding, playing at being a tough guy, and his hand wraps around my neck before I have the chance to get my hands up. Fuck, he’s fast. My lungs scream from the sudden lack of oxygen. I reach for him but he pushes his weight into me, slams my head against the mirror. The panel cracks and I fall to my knees.

  Someone screams.

  There’s no music playing now because it’s between sets, and I look up and Rat Face is scrambling up on stage, where Crystal is holding the remnants of her clothing in tight fists.

  I manage to reach over and hook my hand into Rat Face’s belt and I pull him back down, and he barrels into me and Brillo Head. The three of us tumble into a pile on the floor. I roll away, extricate myself from the mess, and jump to my feet. Rat Face seems like the easier of the two to handle, so I jab him in the nose, enough to break it and make it bleed, and he gets all worked up over that, which lets me focus on Brillo Head.